Iraqi Offensive Revives Debate for Campaigns

Senator John McCain greeting a local official on March 16 in Haditha, Iraq. He says recent Iraqi efforts are a sign of strength.Credit
Cpl. Shawn Coolman/Department of Defense, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The heavy fighting that broke out last week as Iraqi security forces tried to oust Shiite militias from Basra is reverberating on the presidential campaign trail and posing new challenges and opportunities to the candidates, particularly Senator John McCain.

The fierce fighting — and the threat that it could undo a long-term truce that has greatly helped to reduce the level of violence in Iraq — thrust the war back into the headlines and the public consciousness just as it had been receding behind a tide of economic concerns. And it raised anew a host of politically charged questions about whether the current strategy is succeeding, how capable the Iraqis are of defending themselves and what the potential impact would be of any American troop withdrawals.

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made the Iraq war a centerpiece of his campaign; he rode to success in the primary season partly on his early advocacy of the troop buildup. The battle in Basra broke out as he returned from a trip to Iraq this month, proclaiming that violence there was down and that the troop escalation was working.

Mr. McCain, of Arizona, said he was encouraged that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government had sent its troops to reclaim Basra from the Shiite militias. “I think it’s a sign of the strength of his government,” Mr. McCain said Friday at a stop in Las Vegas. “I think it’s going to be a tough fight. We know that these militias are well entrenched there. I hope they will succeed and succeed quickly.”

The Democrats, who are calling for phased troop withdrawals, are beginning to point to the fighting in Basra as evidence that the American troop buildup has failed to provide stability and political reconciliation — particularly if the fighting leads one militia, the Mahdi Army, to pull out of its cease-fire; that could lead to a new spate of sectarian violence across the country. Some are saying the fighting strengthens their case for troop withdrawals.

But the McCain campaign is hoping to turn that argument on its head, asserting that the battle in Basra shows just how dangerous the situation on the ground in Iraq is. It says this bolsters Mr. McCain’s argument that a premature withdrawal of American troops would lead to more widespread violence, instability and perhaps even genocide.

“I think that what this demonstrates is that there are very powerful forces that still remain that do not want to see the success of the central government and that would relish the prospect of the American withdrawal so that they could try to fight or shoot their way into power,” said Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s senior foreign policy adviser. “Would you rather have the Maliki government in control, or the Iranian-backed special groups in control, or Al Qaeda in control?”

But at a news conference on Saturday in Johnstown, Pa., Senator Barack Obama of Illinois suggested the news from Basra highlighted his contention that American military involvement could not solve the deep-seated problems facing Iraq.

“I don’t want to suggest I’ve absorbed all of the facts,” about the situation in Basra, Mr. Obama said. But, he continued, what he had heard “appears consistent with my general analysis. The presence of our troops and their excellence has resulted in some reduction in violence. It has not resolved the underlying tensions that exist in Iraq.”

Dennis B. Ross, a Middle East peace negotiator in the administrations of the first President Bush and President Bill Clinton, said the violence posed risks for candidates in both parties.

“Senator McCain is more vulnerable than the Democrats, because this is a reminder of how messy the situation remains in Iraq,” Mr. Ross said. “This is an interesting reminder of how much remains to be done. With the main focus having been on the military side, the surge has not created enough of a self-sustaining political fabric.”

Campaign officials in both parties cautioned that the situation in Iraq appeared fluid and that preliminary reports of what was going on there were incomplete. And much depends on the eventual outcome in Basra. It could end up showing that the Iraqi government is capable of taking control back from the militias. Or it could show the Iraqis are incapable of defending themselves, shattering a fragile cease-fire in the process.

Either way, officials in both parties agreed that the fighting in Basra — coming two weeks before Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill — was likely to intensify the debate over the war again.

Photo

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, campaigning Friday in Fort Wayne, Ind., says the troop buildup has not met its goals.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

Mr. Obama’s opponent for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, did not directly address the Basra situation on Saturday and instead kept the focus on economic issues. But aides to both candidates said the fighting there raised troubling questions about whether the troop buildup was making the country more stable. And given the trouble that the Iraqi security forces have had in ousting the militias, and their need for American air support, they said it also called into question the fighting capabilities of the Iraqi military.

Denis McDonough, a senior foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama, said the situation in Basra “does raise a handful of concerns as it relates to the surge and, more importantly, about the prospect of political reconciliation.”

Lee Feinstein, the national security director for the Clinton campaign, said: “The sectarian fighting is continuing and apparently now intensifying with some 150,000 U.S. troops on the ground. The Bush-Cheney-McCain policy is to say we can’t bring our troops home when violence appears to be down, and that we can’t remove our troops when violence is increasing as we have seen this week.

“The only way to get the Iraqis to accept responsibility for their future is by no longer extending them an indefinite blank check, intensifying diplomacy and withdrawing our troops swiftly, responsibly and safely.”

Mrs. Clinton has recently been arguing that the troop buildup had failed to achieve its goals, as she did at a campaign event Tuesday in Pennsylvania. “President Bush seems to want to keep as many people as possible in Iraq,” she said. “It’s a clear admission that the surge has failed to accomplish its goals.”

Mr. Ross, who wrote “Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World,” said the Basra fighting posed hard questions not only for Mr. McCain but also for the Democrats. “It is a little sobering to say you can withdraw on a fixed timetable,” he said.

Aaron Miller, a former State Department official who was an adviser to six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace,” said the political ramifications of the latest fighting would depend on the success of the effort by the Iraqi Army in Basra to root out insurgents.

“If this comes out well and represents a really consequential development, it will play to McCain’s strength, his argument that the surge is working and that training is a long-term effort,” he said. “If it comes out in a gray area, and things start to unravel elsewhere, then it is going to validate the Democratic argument that we don’t know the half of what is going on. It’s very much a question of what the ending is and whether it is clear cut.”

Steve Friess and Michael Powell contributed reporting.

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